Book Review: Destiny of the Species

“We all know the same truth, and our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”¹

Lemme get the criticism out of the way: don't judge the book by its cover. Okay, moving on.

I don’t know Jason as a colleague. But I do know him as a friend, the sort that won’t always tell you what you want to hear but one that is primarily concerned with what’s true, the sort that will follow his convictions wherever they lead, even to his own detriment. That has to count for something in this seemingly God-forsaken short life.

It is to this life as “water spilled on the ground, which can’t be gathered again” (2 Sam 14:14), and its nagging absurdity before the face of . . . nothing—Deus absconditus, if you will—that Jason confronts in his new book, The Destiny of the Species: Man and the Future That Pulls Him. The title of it behooves me to attempt immediately to alleviate any fears that while Darwin and the question of the origin of our species sometimes serves as the foil throughout the following pages, this book is decidedly not another pathetic battle for the beginning. It is, in brief, to turn the heads of every reader toward last things first. No doubt, the question of human origins is important. But the destiny of our species—now, that’s something upon which to fix our gaze.

Even if we were to grant the neo-Darwinian synthesis its basic veracity (as I do), the point is still the same: Are we humans going to live down to our natural instincts? Or are we going to live up to the creator God’s goal, bearing his image, reflecting his glory? Saint Gregory of Nyssa frames it as follows: In discussing the creation of man, he starts with the premise that the cosmos depends upon the sustaining Word of God and that all things came into existence by this power. He’s quick, however, to maintain a Creator/creature distinction: the act of creation was no necessity. Rather, creation sprung out of the “abundant love” of God; his desire was to fashion a humanity with the express purpose to share in his divine goodness. This, for Gregory, remains part and parcel of what it means to be created in the image of God.²

The theme of a longing that “pulls” us toward our destiny (to use Jason’s language à la Peter Kreeft à la Aquinas) is not unique. Many others in times past have thought similar thoughts. But Jason does so for a generation in desperate need to hear them again, and he does so in such a way that this generation will hear them.

Starting with this theme of humanity being drawn toward its future, rather than driven by its past, Stellman confronts us with the challenge to live deliberately in light of this truth. And the only way to consistently live in such a way is to embrace, wholeheartedly, the destiny of the species as homo adorans—worshiping man. Otherwise, life as l’étranger in the face of the absurd is all that’s left. More than anybody else, those who say they already follow this way must resist storing up treasures that "moth and rust destroy." But damn that flesh, that old man—sin—ever seeking to throttle us from its grave. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The age to come dawns upon us; all that was accomplished and applied through the faithful life, the ignominy of the cross, the surprising resurrection, and the glorious ascension and rule of God’s messiah, has invaded our lives. Nothing can ever be the same. And the world—its people, plants, and animals—are aching and groaning toward that promised hope for the future, when the creator God, through his son Christ Jesus, by the power of his Spirit, will turn everything right-side up again (the felix culpa, as it turns out).

However, in the meantime, per Woody Allen, we do all know the same truth (that death comes for us all), and, indeed, how we live our lives—our thoughts, words, actions—the stuff that fills them up, is our way of coping with (distorting even) that reality. Which distortion, then, will you let have the final word? Death? Or eternal life on a renewed earth in renewed, resurrected bodies?

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1 Woody Allen: A Documentary, directed by Robert B. Weide (2011; New York, NY: New Video, 2012), DVD.^↩

2 From his Address on Religious Instruction, reprinted in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 275–77.^↩

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto, final thoughts

I realized last week that I didn't have much more to say about Stellman's project than what I've said already (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). I was expecting a little pushback from folks on the points I raised about the sacraments (if not the Sabbath)….

So, one final word of caution might be in order: a healthy skepticism of the modern church, and especially evangelicalism, on a bad day slides easily into cynicism, which is just a hair’s breath away from devolving into hatred for fellow believers. This was one of the major sins of the leaders of Israel during Jesus’ day, as they held contemptuous what God himself had wept over. For us, it’d be like sitting through a Bible study about the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as bad a sinner as the tax collector and then closing that Bible study with a prayer thanking God that we’re not like that self-righteous Pharisee. Embracing two-kingdoms doctrine and the subversion and disdain of modern, Western Christian worldliness that it produces must be motivated by a deep and lasting love for Christ and his church (inextricably bound together as the two are). Put differently, if you’re not dedicated to being a living witness among God’s people (one who has his “head in heaven, fingers in the mire,” to follow Stellman in quoting Bono, 135) to the truths you’ve come to believe as a result of this book (or other study), then kindly keep criticisms of this sort to yourself.

*UPDATE and final thought: As long as there's stuff like this (be sure to watch promo #2) being promulgated by and for 'Christians', books like Dual Citizens must continue to be written. "Sometimes history does repeat itself." Indeed.

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto

This post begins a multi-series book review, or, rather, walkthrough of Jason J. Stellman's Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and Not Yet. I jotted this down as I was reading the pre-publication manuscript (note therefore that my page numbering may be off) and was thinking I'd cull together some of it for an actual review to be of use somewhere, but the "conflict of interest" factor proved too great. So I'll be posting my thoughts here alone. Again, this is more of a walkthrough, and as such, my personal opinions will be kept to a minimum, except where it provoked a more visceral reaction. Please note that I had nothing to do with this manuscript's acceptance, development, etc.; I have no official role in Reformation Trust. Here goes:

The last thing we need is another book analyzing the problems facing the Western church or how “Christ” relates to “culture,” right? (In fact, once I read Rodney Clapp’s Peculiar People and then Craig Gay’s The Way of the (Modern) World, not to mention Hauerwas' and Willimon's Resident Aliens, I considered this genre officially closed.) Well, I guess we wouldn’t need another one if the majority of them were more concerned with fidelity to the charter (i.e., Scripture) given to the church by Jesus and his apostles than with “transforming” or improving culture—often through questionable, cultural (and thus ultimately subjective and relative) tactics.

One of the many reasons, it seems, that Christians drift toward this latter tendency is their forgetfulness. What do they forget? The stated central thesis of Stellman’s book: “…the new covenant situates us in a tension between ‘the already’ on the one hand and the ‘not yet’ on the other” (xiii). This tension arises out of the fact that God’s Messiah has already come and inaugurated his Father’s kingdom, while leaving some aspects of it not yet enacted. “God’s delay in ushering in the kingdom in its glorious and final form means that we live in the intersection of the present and the futures as exiles and pilgrims in the divinely ordained overlap of the ages” (xiv).  Sound like a bore? Maybe, if you already have this stuff figured out. But the actions, concerns, and emphases of the majority of American Christians betrays otherwise. Thus the need for yet another book on this subject. In short, what we’ve got here in Dual Citizens appears to be young, restless, and, with apologies to Mr. Hansen, thoroughly Reformed.

The book itself is split in two: part one looks at worship and part two deals with life. Both are discussed under the rubric of living as pilgrims in these times between the times.

Expecting the reader to scratch his head in response to the subtitle, “Worship and Life Between the Already and Not Yet,” Stellman begins by taking to task what is often taken for granted in the Western church. Thus his introduction begins by tearing asunder what many Christians think God hath joined together: worship and life. “Characteristic of this position,” Stellman writes, “is Reformed theologian John Frame, who insists that ‘there is no real difference between worship and the rest of life…[for] it is very difficult, in general, to separate “life” from “worship” in a biblical framework’” (xviii). Contrarily, Stellman argues that God’s Word maintains this distinction, and he spends the remainder of his introduction attempting to prove just that (it is this particular point that distinguishes Stellman’s attempt from so many of the others. Most, in my experience, collapse this distinction, and, indeed, decry it).

The main reason he finds the distinction valid is due to the place Christ’s church now occupies: “The people of God under the new covenant are in a situation more like that of the patriarchs under the Abrahamic covenant than that of Israel under the Mosaic covenant” (xxv). That is to say, the church is not a “triumphant theocratic nation dwelling in an earthly holy land, but a band of dispossessed pilgrims whose true country—of which Eden and Canaan were types and shadows—is not to be found ‘under the sun’ but beyond it, in heaven itself” (Ibid.). Note his connection of the nation of Israel—the ‘cult’ (a religious realm as distinct from the secular realm, see fn. 2, xxviii)—to their land.

Following Meredith Kline (in Kingdom Prologue), Stellman argues that God’s rule over both pre-fallen man and Israel included a realm, namely the garden of Eden and the Promised Land. For both Adam and Israel, God provided “for his covenant people a distinct land in which they are to serve Him as His loyal subjects…[where] cult and culture, church and world, temple and palace, are one” (xix–xx). But under Abraham, as under the new covenant, the situation can be characterized as “pilgrim politics, a term that highlights [the patriarch’s—and the church’s] status not as a triumphant theocratic army but as ‘resident aliens’ and ‘tolerated sojourners’ whose inheritance was not yet a reality” (xxi, emphases original throughout, unless otherwise indicated). Indeed, precisely because of the church’s lack of a distinct country, “we exist in a cultural realm that is distinct from that of the cultic. We are, like the patriarchs religiously particular but culturally indistinct. For the new covenant church, cult is distinct from culture, church is distinct from world, and the sacred is distinct from the secular” (xxvi).

Has your hair begun to bristle? So keen are we Christians to transform or improve culture in the name of Christ that such notions of seeming withdrawal produce reflexive scorn. But Stellman doesn’t back down (nor does he intend for the church to “withdraw,” as we shall see). He sees himself comfortably couched not just in the Reformation principle of Christians simultaneously living in two kingdoms but in the Pauline notion that culture has its own legitimacy apart from cult (again, understood as a secular realm distinct from the religious realm). The American nation is decidedly a “non-theocratic context” and thus we Christians, like the Christians of the first century, are to submit to the governing authorities, as well as participate in them (ibid.). Both the secular and sacred are under the reign of God, and thus distinguishing between life and worship, as the subtitle of his book suggests, Stellman argues is “a necessary consequence of careful Bible study” and life under the new covenant (xvii).

I suppose I could just leave the whole discussion here, since this series is filled with spoilers…

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